Sharp chiaroscuro, snappy dialogue, actors with shadows delineating their faces—when we think noir, we tend to think film noir, from a small selection of canonical movies whose aesthetics and tropes have been transferred from (or to) similarly-presented literature. In The Best American Noir of the Century, editor Otto Penzler suggests that this is a somewhat limiting view, and presents an alternative definition:
"Noir works ... are existential, pessimistic tales about people, including (or especially) protagonists who are seriously flawed and morally questionable. The tone is generally bleak and nihilistic, with characters whose greed, lust, jealousy, and alienation lead them into a downward spiral as their plans and schemes inevitably go awry."
What I like about this definition is that aesthetics aren't mentioned in the least; real noir is not about what something looks like, and more about the underlying pattern of people repeatedly succumbing to their atavistic impulses (and being entertaining to watch while they do it). The noir hero is more likely to be an antihero—heroic only in the context of being surrounded by other people who are demonstrably worse.
Penzler also (handily for me) attempts to unpick the conflation of two heavily overlapping subgenres that has always bothered me by adding, "The private detective story is a different matter ... the American private detective retains his sense of honour in the face of all the adversity and duplicity with which he must do battle." Not every detective movie is a noir; not every noir has to feature a detective; noir is essentially structural, regardless of what the lighting director is doing.
This means that noir can also be genre-agnostic—you can have noir in different settings (I have a friend who reads almost exclusively Scandinavian noir and never runs out of material), and in different genres, like sci-fi and fantasy. In speculative fiction, because the familiar trappings of vocabulary and infrastructure (organized crime, detectives, cops, etc) often look different, it can be hard to pin down works that might fall under noir rather than procedural or detective. When I was coming up with examples, I thought first of Corporal Vimes from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, particularly the first book, Guards! Guards!. But I think Vimes, who persistently attempts to be an exception to ACAB no matter what temptations or threats cross his path, is more detective than noir; he's often presented as a bona fide antihero, but the sea of fellow antiheroes in which he swims is not bleak enough to qualify the City Watch books as noir. The books being funny doesn't disqualify them—noir is often both fun and funny, no matter how bleak—but Vimes' moral code is ever-present.
Why does it work in every genre? Because the appeal is genre-agnostic. Novelist James Ellroy presents it as, "The thrill of noir is the rush of moral forfeit and the abandonment to titillation ... The overarching joy and lasting appeal of noir is that it makes doom fun."
Nick Harkaway's novel Titanium Noir is a great example of updated sci-fi noir—both the sci-fi elements (the creation of Titans, high-tech weapons and defenses, genetic engineering, surveillance) and the noir elements (organized crime families, corrupt cops and politicians, shady businesses trading in illegal materials, messy fights) are present and inextricable, and they work together to show how the desire for power and immortality twists people into monsters (literally, in this case). The protagonist, Cal Sounder, isn't ashamed of his unsavory past, but he's not working towards a more salutary future, either. He is unapologetic; he is urged on by fear and guilt; he doesn't expect a redemption arc by the end of the book.
Similarly, Jeff Noon's A Man of Shadows and its sequels, and Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim books, could be classed as speculative noir; the plots rely on the speculative elements and they tend to foreground, rather than gloss, those moments where the reader notices that the protagonists are not interested in character development; their characters are just fine, thank you very much.
In Cassandra Khaw's Persons Non Grata series, the sandbox and imagery is from cosmic horror, but the themes and character motivations are quintessentially noir. Persons, the narrator, is happy to be the antihero, and takes on the case in the first book as one monster compelled to respond to another, rather than any sense of moral obligation to help a child:
"Will you take the job?"
wehavetowehavetowehaveto
Persistent as bear traps, these two. I smile through my teeth and the pleas that won't stop pounding in my head. "Kid, I don't think I have a choice."
It's not that characters in a noir lack agency; it's usually, as we see in Hammers on Bone, that their agency seems less rational than the usual cool-headed protagonists of, say, detective stories. They seem driven by glands rather than calculation; they are often reactive rather than proactive. Where they make plans, the plans often fall apart because of impulsivity, greed, or temper, rather than the competence of outside forces meant to thwart them.
Ellen Datlow, in her introduction to the anthology Supernatural Noir, points out that, "Noir is an attitude, a stance, a way of looking at the world." This is a point of commonality with horror as well, as critics and academics continue to debate whether horror is a genre of its own, a set of traits that can be applied to any genre and medium, or something else. It's another case of "Well, I know it when I see it," which lends itself quite well to the sixteen stories in this anthology: if we attempt to analyze them for noir elements or supernatural elements, we will essentially break the toy. We will take away the intangible qualities of aesthetic, message, motivation, and fun that makes the story work.
"Am I writing a noir story?" an author may wonder. Maybe, maybe not; you'll have to wait until it can be perceived as a completed whole until you know. But for the sake of a minimal amount of guidance, I will end on a final quote from Penzler:
"The likelihood of a happy ending in a noir story is remote, even if the protagonist's own view of a satisfactory resolution is the criterion for defining happy. No, it will end badly, because the characters are inherently corrupt and that is the fate that inevitably awaits them."
Further reading:
- Titanium Noir, Nick Harkaway
- John Nyquist series, Jeff Noon
- Sandman Slim series, Richard Kadrey
- Hammers on Bone, Cassandra Khaw
- Supernatural Noir, ed. Ellen Datlow
- Certain Dark Things, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
- The Master books, Claire North
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick